Wool and Water
Title: Wool and Water
Rating: PG
Characters: Ianto, team (Jack/Ianto)
Words: ~1,700
Beta: pocky_slash, to whom I basically owe the rest of my life in beta time.
Summary: Ianto's memory is wiped by alien technology, and he's given antiretcon in an attempt to reverse it.
This was written for ladykorana, for her donation of $10 to Doctors Without Borders. Sorry for the wait! This one was a little more difficult than the others. I really hope that you like it.
“It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward.”
-Lewis Carroll
----------------------------------
Gwen leaned her forearms on her thighs, her hands clasped in front of her. “It was a machine. Some kind of alien mind-wipe. It took--” She shook her head, hair falling around her face, hiding it. She drew in a breath. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
Ianto sat next to her on the cell bench, very still, as if moving would break something. “You can try,” he said.
She looked at him. “You’re still--” She paused, searching for the words. “You can still speak, and you have a basic understanding of the world. But you don’t have anything to back it up. No memories.”
“Is that - bad?” He didn’t look frightened. He didn’t have a reason to be frightened. No previous experience that told him that the Torchwood cells were not a nice place to be. There was nothing behind his eyes but English and whatever had happened in the last three hours. They’d shown him a photograph of the Earth, and he’d asked what it was.
“It’s bad,” she said. She looked away again, out of the clear cell door, across the aisle. Janet was moaning a few cells down. He wouldn’t know that she was alien, if he could see her. “Owen says that it’s all to do with memory, not with any other part of your mind. So if the antiretcon works, it will restore you back to how you should be.”
“Owen?” Ianto asked.
“The doctor. The man in the white coat upstairs.”
Ianto nodded. “And you’re Gwen,” he said.
“Yes.” She looked at him. “The others are Tosh and Jack.”
He smiled. “And I’m Ianto.”
His eyes were extremely blue, and so clear. Gwen had never seen him sit relaxed like this -- not hunched or erect, but calm. Not hiding behind anything, because there was nothing to hide. Not controlled, because there was nothing to control. She bit her lip and looked away. “You’re Ianto,” she said quietly, and it was completely false.
When he laid his hand over hers in her lap, even the comfort felt wrong.
- - -
Owen’s gloved left hand gripped Ianto’s shoulder to hold him still, the other pressing the stethoscope against his skin. Ianto stared down at his own bare chest. “It’s cold,” he said.
“Shut up for a second,” Owen grunted, moving the stethoscope to the right. Then he stood back, pulling the buds out of his ears. “Heart and lungs are fine. Sometimes the antiretcon can mess with autonomic functions, make it hard to--” He caught sight of Ianto’s intensely serene face, staring up at him completely uncomprehending, and he scowled. “Oh, you don’t give a shit.” He stuffed the stethoscope back in his bag on the cell floor and pulled a pen torch from his breast pocket. He held Ianto’s left eye open with his fingers and shone the light into it. “If the antiretcon is working, you’re going to start getting memories back. There’s no order to them, so you’ll not be able to put them together before you have all of them. If you get all of them.” He moved on to Ianto’s right eye, perturbed that he wasn’t even flinching. Wasn’t that an instinctive response? “There’s also a chance that you might remember everything. Every class schedule from every year of school. Every word of every book you’ve ever read. That kind of remembering will probably kill you.”
The Ianto in Owen’s head said, I’m touched by your concern. The Ianto on the cell bench said, “And that’s bad?”
He was like a robot.
Owen clicked the pen torch off and tucked it away again. “Yell for me if you feel like you’re dying,” he muttered.
“How does that feel?”
- - -
Tosh stood outside of the cell, fingers wrapped through the holes in the thick plastic wall. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” he said. “How are you?”
“Fine.” She wiggled her fingers in the holes, forehead pressed against the plastic. She kept her eyes on him: Ianto in one of his usual suits, sitting hunched over his knees, face distantly troubled. “Are you remembering anything?”
Ianto nodded. He looked at the cement floor of the cell. He scraped one shoe back and forth along the uneven surface. “I remember my family. My parents and my sister, her family.” He paused. “My parents are dead.”
Tosh closed her eyes, the plastic wall strangely cool against her skin. “Do you wish,” she asked, almost hesitant. “Do you think it would have been better if they didn’t give you antiretcon?”
Ianto blinked at her in the dim light of the cells. He looked profoundly tired, ragged from three days spent pressed between concrete and plastic. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said. He rubbed his rough, unshaven face with the palms of his hands. “Why are they still keeping me in here?”
“We need to keep you under surveillance. We don’t know what kind of effect the antiretcon will have on your kind of memory loss. There’s a chance it could cause psychosis.” She trailed the fingers of her right hand from hole to hole, watching them rather than looking at Ianto .
And Jack doesn’t want to have to look at you.
“There’s this woman,” he said, and Tosh’s stomach opened up with grief for him. “We were together. I don’t understand some of the things I remember about her.” He looked at her. “But I feel like I’m going to, soon. Do I want to?”
Tosh pressed the door open and came inside to sit beside him while he remembered Lisa.
- - -
The man in the blue coat came into the cell when Ianto was curled into a corner, his head cradled in his hands. He stood just past the door, his right hand still outside, resting on the button that allowed him to enter. “Are you all right?”
Ianto looked at him through the gap between his hands, but had to look away, cover his eyes and turn his face into a wall as the pain and confusion flooded back into his brain again. He choked out a surprised sob. He was in a thousand places at once. The Hub, Torchwood One, his father’s garden. He’d broken four bones in his body so far, one of them twice. The name of every student in his graduating class wound around his head and seemed to constrict.
The man crossed the cell and knelt in front of him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Ianto. Look at me, Ianto.”
Ianto couldn’t. He buried his face in his knees. The key codes to all of the Torchwood sublevels; the procedures for security breaches to the Hub; the name of every book on the shelves in the apartment he’d shared with Lisa in London.
The feeling of Lisa’s hands on his skin, her breath against his neck. The metal encasing her head slick with blood.
Ianto struck out with his arms and legs and knocked the man backwards onto his ass with a surprised oof. He scrambled closer to the wall, pulling his knees higher against his chest, trying desperately to take in breath past the uncomfortable heaving of his lungs.
The man sat up, wincing. He watched Ianto for a moment; watched as Ianto dug his nails into the creases where the blocks forming the wall met, watched his eyes go wide and blink and close against waves of pain. “Ianto,” he said.
“What - is this?” Ianto gasped, hands curling into fists as he bit back a cry. 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816-
“The antiretcon,” the man said. “You’re remembering.”
“Make it - stop.”
The man shuffled forward a few feet on his knees, then reached out and took Ianto by both shoulders, turning him so that his back was flush against the wall. “Ianto,” he said. “Look at me.”
Ianto did. Every single birthday. (Rhiannon lit her hair on his cake when he was four.)
“Do you know who I am?”
Ianto thought. He closed his eyes, opened and closed his fists and bit down against the lyrics to every Beatles song ever written. “You’re there,” he said. “You’re there, but I can’t - it doesn’t--”
“Ianto, look at me, please.” The man held his eyes. “It’s me. It’s Jack. I’m your boss, remember?”
Gwen, Tosh, Owen - the man in the coat, he left once, and Ianto was - What was he?
“Ianto, it’s Jack.” Jack shook him gently by the shoulders. “You have to hold on to something. Something has to keep you grounded. It’ll stop soon, but you have to find something that keeps--”
Ianto leaned forward and pressed his lips to Jack’s, pulling Jack against him. Jack lost his balance and fell against the wall, bounced to the floor, and Ianto followed, hardly pausing to breathe, only aware of his hands in Jack’s hair, his chest against Jack’s, Jack’s hands on his neck and the small of his back, keeping him there. The waves of memories in his head crested with hundreds of images similar to this one, things in the dark with both of them, and then everything was suddenly connected. A needle and thread through his mind, patching the disconnected scenes back together. There was order out of chaos.
Ianto took a huge breath and rolled off of Jack, onto his back on the floor, and looked up at the ceiling, feeling himself slot back into place.
Jack sat up. “You all right?”
Ianto exhaled. He closed his eyes and opened them again. He turned his head so that he could see Jack looking down at him. “You’re going to be impossibly cocky about this, aren’t you?”
Jack blinked at him. “What?”
“The thing that grounds me to myself is being with you?” He pressed his hands against the sockets of his eyes. “I’m never going to live this down.”
Jack laughed. It was breathy and relieved. He flopped down next to Ianto on the floor again. “I promise not to tell your mates at school.”
Ianto smiled, exhausted. He reached out and gripped the edge of Jack’s waistcoat, curling his fingers under the fabric. “Thank you,” he said.
Jack reached down to put his hand on top of Ianto’s. “No problem.”
Rating: PG
Characters: Ianto, team (Jack/Ianto)
Words: ~1,700
Beta: pocky_slash, to whom I basically owe the rest of my life in beta time.
Summary: Ianto's memory is wiped by alien technology, and he's given antiretcon in an attempt to reverse it.
This was written for ladykorana, for her donation of $10 to Doctors Without Borders. Sorry for the wait! This one was a little more difficult than the others. I really hope that you like it.
“It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward.”
-Lewis Carroll
----------------------------------
Gwen leaned her forearms on her thighs, her hands clasped in front of her. “It was a machine. Some kind of alien mind-wipe. It took--” She shook her head, hair falling around her face, hiding it. She drew in a breath. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
Ianto sat next to her on the cell bench, very still, as if moving would break something. “You can try,” he said.
She looked at him. “You’re still--” She paused, searching for the words. “You can still speak, and you have a basic understanding of the world. But you don’t have anything to back it up. No memories.”
“Is that - bad?” He didn’t look frightened. He didn’t have a reason to be frightened. No previous experience that told him that the Torchwood cells were not a nice place to be. There was nothing behind his eyes but English and whatever had happened in the last three hours. They’d shown him a photograph of the Earth, and he’d asked what it was.
“It’s bad,” she said. She looked away again, out of the clear cell door, across the aisle. Janet was moaning a few cells down. He wouldn’t know that she was alien, if he could see her. “Owen says that it’s all to do with memory, not with any other part of your mind. So if the antiretcon works, it will restore you back to how you should be.”
“Owen?” Ianto asked.
“The doctor. The man in the white coat upstairs.”
Ianto nodded. “And you’re Gwen,” he said.
“Yes.” She looked at him. “The others are Tosh and Jack.”
He smiled. “And I’m Ianto.”
His eyes were extremely blue, and so clear. Gwen had never seen him sit relaxed like this -- not hunched or erect, but calm. Not hiding behind anything, because there was nothing to hide. Not controlled, because there was nothing to control. She bit her lip and looked away. “You’re Ianto,” she said quietly, and it was completely false.
When he laid his hand over hers in her lap, even the comfort felt wrong.
- - -
Owen’s gloved left hand gripped Ianto’s shoulder to hold him still, the other pressing the stethoscope against his skin. Ianto stared down at his own bare chest. “It’s cold,” he said.
“Shut up for a second,” Owen grunted, moving the stethoscope to the right. Then he stood back, pulling the buds out of his ears. “Heart and lungs are fine. Sometimes the antiretcon can mess with autonomic functions, make it hard to--” He caught sight of Ianto’s intensely serene face, staring up at him completely uncomprehending, and he scowled. “Oh, you don’t give a shit.” He stuffed the stethoscope back in his bag on the cell floor and pulled a pen torch from his breast pocket. He held Ianto’s left eye open with his fingers and shone the light into it. “If the antiretcon is working, you’re going to start getting memories back. There’s no order to them, so you’ll not be able to put them together before you have all of them. If you get all of them.” He moved on to Ianto’s right eye, perturbed that he wasn’t even flinching. Wasn’t that an instinctive response? “There’s also a chance that you might remember everything. Every class schedule from every year of school. Every word of every book you’ve ever read. That kind of remembering will probably kill you.”
The Ianto in Owen’s head said, I’m touched by your concern. The Ianto on the cell bench said, “And that’s bad?”
He was like a robot.
Owen clicked the pen torch off and tucked it away again. “Yell for me if you feel like you’re dying,” he muttered.
“How does that feel?”
- - -
Tosh stood outside of the cell, fingers wrapped through the holes in the thick plastic wall. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” he said. “How are you?”
“Fine.” She wiggled her fingers in the holes, forehead pressed against the plastic. She kept her eyes on him: Ianto in one of his usual suits, sitting hunched over his knees, face distantly troubled. “Are you remembering anything?”
Ianto nodded. He looked at the cement floor of the cell. He scraped one shoe back and forth along the uneven surface. “I remember my family. My parents and my sister, her family.” He paused. “My parents are dead.”
Tosh closed her eyes, the plastic wall strangely cool against her skin. “Do you wish,” she asked, almost hesitant. “Do you think it would have been better if they didn’t give you antiretcon?”
Ianto blinked at her in the dim light of the cells. He looked profoundly tired, ragged from three days spent pressed between concrete and plastic. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said. He rubbed his rough, unshaven face with the palms of his hands. “Why are they still keeping me in here?”
“We need to keep you under surveillance. We don’t know what kind of effect the antiretcon will have on your kind of memory loss. There’s a chance it could cause psychosis.” She trailed the fingers of her right hand from hole to hole, watching them rather than looking at Ianto .
And Jack doesn’t want to have to look at you.
“There’s this woman,” he said, and Tosh’s stomach opened up with grief for him. “We were together. I don’t understand some of the things I remember about her.” He looked at her. “But I feel like I’m going to, soon. Do I want to?”
Tosh pressed the door open and came inside to sit beside him while he remembered Lisa.
- - -
The man in the blue coat came into the cell when Ianto was curled into a corner, his head cradled in his hands. He stood just past the door, his right hand still outside, resting on the button that allowed him to enter. “Are you all right?”
Ianto looked at him through the gap between his hands, but had to look away, cover his eyes and turn his face into a wall as the pain and confusion flooded back into his brain again. He choked out a surprised sob. He was in a thousand places at once. The Hub, Torchwood One, his father’s garden. He’d broken four bones in his body so far, one of them twice. The name of every student in his graduating class wound around his head and seemed to constrict.
The man crossed the cell and knelt in front of him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Ianto. Look at me, Ianto.”
Ianto couldn’t. He buried his face in his knees. The key codes to all of the Torchwood sublevels; the procedures for security breaches to the Hub; the name of every book on the shelves in the apartment he’d shared with Lisa in London.
The feeling of Lisa’s hands on his skin, her breath against his neck. The metal encasing her head slick with blood.
Ianto struck out with his arms and legs and knocked the man backwards onto his ass with a surprised oof. He scrambled closer to the wall, pulling his knees higher against his chest, trying desperately to take in breath past the uncomfortable heaving of his lungs.
The man sat up, wincing. He watched Ianto for a moment; watched as Ianto dug his nails into the creases where the blocks forming the wall met, watched his eyes go wide and blink and close against waves of pain. “Ianto,” he said.
“What - is this?” Ianto gasped, hands curling into fists as he bit back a cry. 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816-
“The antiretcon,” the man said. “You’re remembering.”
“Make it - stop.”
The man shuffled forward a few feet on his knees, then reached out and took Ianto by both shoulders, turning him so that his back was flush against the wall. “Ianto,” he said. “Look at me.”
Ianto did. Every single birthday. (Rhiannon lit her hair on his cake when he was four.)
“Do you know who I am?”
Ianto thought. He closed his eyes, opened and closed his fists and bit down against the lyrics to every Beatles song ever written. “You’re there,” he said. “You’re there, but I can’t - it doesn’t--”
“Ianto, look at me, please.” The man held his eyes. “It’s me. It’s Jack. I’m your boss, remember?”
Gwen, Tosh, Owen - the man in the coat, he left once, and Ianto was - What was he?
“Ianto, it’s Jack.” Jack shook him gently by the shoulders. “You have to hold on to something. Something has to keep you grounded. It’ll stop soon, but you have to find something that keeps--”
Ianto leaned forward and pressed his lips to Jack’s, pulling Jack against him. Jack lost his balance and fell against the wall, bounced to the floor, and Ianto followed, hardly pausing to breathe, only aware of his hands in Jack’s hair, his chest against Jack’s, Jack’s hands on his neck and the small of his back, keeping him there. The waves of memories in his head crested with hundreds of images similar to this one, things in the dark with both of them, and then everything was suddenly connected. A needle and thread through his mind, patching the disconnected scenes back together. There was order out of chaos.
Ianto took a huge breath and rolled off of Jack, onto his back on the floor, and looked up at the ceiling, feeling himself slot back into place.
Jack sat up. “You all right?”
Ianto exhaled. He closed his eyes and opened them again. He turned his head so that he could see Jack looking down at him. “You’re going to be impossibly cocky about this, aren’t you?”
Jack blinked at him. “What?”
“The thing that grounds me to myself is being with you?” He pressed his hands against the sockets of his eyes. “I’m never going to live this down.”
Jack laughed. It was breathy and relieved. He flopped down next to Ianto on the floor again. “I promise not to tell your mates at school.”
Ianto smiled, exhausted. He reached out and gripped the edge of Jack’s waistcoat, curling his fingers under the fabric. “Thank you,” he said.
Jack reached down to put his hand on top of Ianto’s. “No problem.”